


With These Eyes Before

by Duck_Life



Category: Generation X (Comic), Uncanny Avengers, X-Men (Comicverse)
Genre: Angst, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Oreos
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-22
Updated: 2015-01-22
Packaged: 2018-03-08 14:45:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,086
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3213005
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Duck_Life/pseuds/Duck_Life
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Banshee's still in Avengers Mansion recovering from his time as the Horseman Death. An old friend comes to visit.</p>
            </blockquote>





	With These Eyes Before

It’s not too much trouble getting into the place- after all, she’s one of the most powerful telepaths alive, and they don’t exactly have A-listers guarding the old Avengers Mansion. She ducks around a few corners, winds her way down two flights of stairs to find the medbay, and there he is.

Sean Cassidy, Banshee, a man who’d countless times stood between his students and threats far greater than his voice, and lived to talk about it. He looks so damn small in the white bed.

There’s no one around, so she loses the psi-shielding and steps into the too-bright light of the cramped room. “Hey,” she says softly.

Sean squints at her for a long, long moment. Then- “Em?”

“Yeah, it’s me,” she says, relief flooding through her like caffeine, that he’s awake and he remembers her and he’s _alive_. “It’s me, Sean,” she says, still in that hushed voice as she pulls a rolling chair over to his side and sits down. “How… how do you feel?”

It’s a dumb question. She can see, judging by all the equipment whirring around him, the data from the nanotech streaming over a monitor in the corner, that he still has so much farther to go before he can answer “fine.” Christ, his skin still looks too blue, like he’s been out in a snowdrift freezing to death.

“Tired,” he answers after a pause. “I’m always tired now.” He makes an attempt at smiling that comes off so pitiful it makes something twist in Emma’s gut. “And ye?”

She thinks about Scott, and the Phoenix, and being on the run. All the damn bad luck they’ve had that he still doesn’t know about. “You know me,” she replies with a grin. “I’m always fine.” She has a sinking sensation that her smile is just as pathetic as his. “I, um. I thought you might want to hear about how the old students are doing. Some good news.” Sean elbows himself into a sitting position on the bed, perking up with interest. His hair looks the same as it always did, and he’s got a decent amount of stubble, just like the old days, but his eyes are so incredibly _wrong_.

Shaking it off, Emma looks somewhere besides his face to talk. “Jubilee, she’s- she has a son now. And she’s with the X-men. Monet too. Fighting side by side instead of… against each other,” she adds with an almost-laugh. She’s still speaking in that same whisper, like she’s afraid she’ll scare him off. “Paige is teaching at the school. And Jonothan, too. Teaching the next _next_ generation of mutants.”

Sean glances over at her with those awful eyes, but it seems like he’s staring _through_ her. “Angelo and Everett are dead.” And she really has no idea what to say to that. “Clarice Ferguson, too.”

“Yes, Sean,” she tells him quietly, only because she can’t let his toneless words hang in the silence any longer. “I’m sorry,” she says, because she doesn’t know what else to say. And she _is_ sorry, not just for the kids they lost but for everything that happened, for the school breaking up and for him dying. And dying. And dying. And for coming back, this time, because he looks so miserable, and it’s all so awful.

He doesn’t say much more after that.

Emma starts coming to visit more frequently, days when she can manage to get away from the New Xavier School, when all the craziness of the present (and, occasionally, the future) dies down enough for her to worry about the craziness of the past.

On the best days, she can carry on a decent conversation with him before something she says or something he remembers sets him off and he clams up.

Clamming up is about the best reaction he has. Sometimes he hallucinates and fights off monsters that aren’t there, and even her climbing inside his head to show him the truth won’t calm him down. Sometimes he refuses to believe he’s alive, and safe, and that Emma is real. Sometimes he curls in on himself and lets out a long and relentless stream of apologies, and won’t let up no matter how much she tells him that it’s not his fault, none of it is his fault, and that he’s been forgiven for anything that _was_.

Sometimes he screams. The windows are prepared for this, but the equipment goes flying and the room shakes. The first time it happens a nurse runs in to sedate him, paying no mind to the fact that the White Queen herself is sitting there in Avengers Mansion.

One night, Emma’s been wading through waist-high crap all day at Xavier’s but she remembers to pick Sean up a pack of Oreos because she remembers he used to like those, one night Sean sits up and smiles and looks her in the eye. One night he laughs about some dumb story and he teases her for being a tight-ass and he eats his Oreos in that infuriating manner of picking them apart and scraping all the frosting off first.

Except the night winds down, and suddenly it’s midnight and it’s like some Cinderella spell is broken. The cookie wrapper is scrunched up by the bed and the smile is gone from Sean’s face.

“I can’t keep doin’ this, Em,” he confides in her, voice dropping to a hoarse whisper. “I can’t,” he says, and at first she thinks he means seeing her, talking to her. “I’m… ev’ry mornin’ I wake up and I don’t know where I am. And.” He swallows. “And I’m terrified to open my mouth because I don’t know if I’m gonna talk or scream. And sometimes I don’t know who I…” And he clams up, and his eyes aren’t wrong, his eyes are his eyes and they’re big and scared and Emma Frost doesn’t know how to fix a damn thing.

“You’re Sean Cassidy,” she tells him, reminds him in an even tone, and she doesn’t cry, she won’t cry in front of him because what right does she have? What right does she have to cry? She got everything she ever wanted. “You’re not Death. You’re not anyone else. You’re Sean Cassidy.”

He looks like he wants to say something else, to add on to his list of torments, but something stops him, and she thinks it might be that he doesn’t want to upset her. And that, more than anything, reminds her that it’s really him. 


End file.
